


Through the Three Hells and Back

by Khaleesi1379



Category: The Crown & the Flame (Visual Novels)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 16:11:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15889494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khaleesi1379/pseuds/Khaleesi1379
Summary: Takes place after the Battle of Thorngate. Val sees Kenna get blasted by Dom and realizes that she may be more invested in the Queen of Stormhalt than she realized.





	Through the Three Hells and Back

They should have let her kill that pansy ass pretty boy.

Val storms through throng after throng of soldiers, shoving and growling her way through the masses until she arrives at the tent.

The anger melts away. She wants to hold onto it. It’s the only thing that makes sense anymore, but she can’t. Not with what waits for her in that tent. The tension in her spine bleeds out, shoulders slumping instead. She takes a deep breath through her nose and steps in before she can think better of it.

Kenna’s there. On the makeshift bed. Torso and arms wrapped almost completely in bandages. Chest rising and falling, breath short and rasping, fever and pain burning through her dreams. Annelyse sits in a chair at her side, dabbing sweat off of her brow with a damp cloth. Her eyes meet Val’s, red rimmed and exhausted. Val freezes, stiffens, everything she’s been trying not to feel coming crashing forward.

Kenna. Burned. Sick. Teetering between life and death.

Val had gotten there too late. Her bloodlust had gotten the better of her. She had been off, running the remaining Nevrakis soldiers out of Thorngate like the rats they were. Word had gotten to her that Kenna was to interrogate the Lord Fat Rat himself, and she’d felt a dark glee take her as she dreamt up all the ways he could be made to pay for what he had done. Kenna was too merciful for her own good. With any luck, Val would get there in just enough time to convince Kenna to have his tongue ripped out of his fat head.  
But, as always, she had no luck.

She’d come into the courtyard just as the flame burst from Dom’s palms. Even from dozens of feet away, she’d felt the heat of it. She’d recoiled at first, but then the sound reached her ears. That scream, the one that she knew deep in her gut would haunt her in her worst nightmares until the end of her days.

She’d known it was Kenna before the inferno had died away. She’d felt it like instinct, twisting in her guts and tearing at her heart in ways that terrified her beyond compare. The fat man was gone. Dominic stood over the cinders that remained of him, chest rising and falling with angry breaths, a rage that had twisted the blue of his eyes into something unrecognizable. And there Kenna was. Smoldering and charred, visibly struggling to pull air into her lungs.

She didn’t look like the heroic Queen of Stormhalt then. She looked so small, lying there on the ground. Val had seen her fingers, graceful and long and the object of one too many stray thoughts, clutch desperately at the flagstones. Once. Twice. Clawing like she was trying to tear herself away from death’s door. She was struggling to take breaths. She was awake for just a moment, clawing at the earth and the air. Then she’d gone still.

Val had never wished death on a man like she wished on Dom in that moment.

She’d hated him before this. Like so many men before him, if you took away his looks he was nothing but a dull lump chasing Kenna’s coattails. She’d seen the way he watched her. Kenna, to her credit, seemed oblivious, but Val knew. Val knew lust better than most, and longing was something she’d started to become intimately familiar with. And there it was, on his dopey, pretty boy face every time Kenna was anywhere within a hundred feet of him. Val hated seeing it, hated the feeling of possessiveness that roared in her belly every time she caught his moony eyes roaming over Kenna’s form.  
Now Kenna was there. Limp and dying on the ground of some stupid fucking castle hundreds of miles from home. And he’d done it to her.

She hated him.

That same anger now washes over her in the present. Her teeth grind until the muscles in her jaw burn. They should have let her kill him.

Annelyse opens her mouth to speak, but Val has already turned on her heel and stormed out. Val had seen the pity in her eyes, the understanding. She wants nothing to do with it.

She’s tearing her way through camp again, energy restless and angry. Soldiers are taking one look at her and clearing a path, fear sending them scampering as if she were some wild beast. She may as well be right now. Gods be damned, she’s feral. Next time she sees Dom, she’s going to crack his fucking skull.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Sei sees her before Dom does. Sees the wild fear in her eyes, the anger. She’s seen those eyes before, felt that fear. Too many times to count in recent days.

It’s not going to get them any place good.

Dom notices nothing. She’d been trying to convince him to come with her, shake him out of the useless stupor he’d fallen into. This had only proven her right. He needed to learn control, needed to control this power before it consumed him. But there was no reaching him. His head hung low, eyes refusing to meet hers, obscured by shaggy golden hair. She didn’t have the time nor the patience for this.

She remembers the horror on the lowlander’s face. His rage had twisted his face into one almost unrecognizable as his flames consumed the man before him. He hadn’t noticed Kenna, hadn’t seen what he’d done. And then his companions were rushing past him, cries piercing through the anger. His head shot in the direction of the sounds, and Sei had seen the moment of clarity, the moment of realization. He brought his hands up, staring down at them as if they were some foreign thing, as if this hadn’t been exactly what she’d warned him would happen.

The mercenary woman reacted more violently than Sei thought even her companions had expected. The battle had calmed, and the woman, covered nearly head to toe in the gore of battle, had arrived just in time to see Kenna blasted back and falling ragged, looking to all the world like a corpse.

Sei is still surprised she wasn’t. The man who had received the full force of the lowlander’s blast had been incinerated. Human flesh one moment, ash in the next. This lowland queen should be dead by all rights.

Val had screamed. The sounds of it tore through the silence and shock, full of anger and something else. Something very much like anguish. She rushed to Kenna’s side, armored form forcing her way through those gathered around the wounded queen.

She arrived and froze, stock still and tense. The medics were frantically at work, rushing to stabilize their young monarch. For a moment in the panic, the woman had seemed lost. The fire had gone out of her, the fire that spit and burned every time she opened her mouth. Sei had admired her for that if nothing else. She was strong, for a lowlander, nearly a force of nature in and of herself. But, in those moments at Kenna’s side, she was small. Lost.

And then her head had snapped up, eyes blazing back to life with hate and rage twisting within them.

Dom, for his part, had been non-responsive. Numb and deaf to the world in the horror of what he’d done. Sei put a hand on his shoulder, fingers digging in and attempting to shake him out of his stupor.

“We should leave, lowlander. You see now why your training is necessary. You should return to it.”

Sei had begun to lead him away. Before she could react, before she could even process her presence, Val had blasted across her vision in a blur of blood red and leather.

Her fist had connected solidly with Dom’s jaw, a resounding crack splitting the tense atmosphere as his head snapped back. The force of the charge carried Val forward, her body colliding with Dom’s and sending him sprawling to the ground. The woman was on him in less than a second, her fist clenching the collar of his tunic around his throat, holding his head aloft. Her other fist closed and snapped forward again. Dom’s head flew to the side, blood and spittle spraying with the force of the blow.

“YOU STUPID. FUCKING. SHITPILE.”

Each word was accented and emphasized with a fist slamming into Dom’s face. Pink tinged spittle turned to gushing blood. His lip split, his eye was already beginning to blacken, the skin on his forehead breaking and bleeding beneath the onslaught of Val’s fists.

Sei rushed forward, finding herself moving in tandem with the man called Jackson as they hauled the mercenary off of Dom’s now limp form. Val’s body thrashed against them, nearly knocking them both off their feet and breaking their grip on her. She dove, trying to get back to the man she had left bloody on the ground. More soldiers rushed forward, until she was being hauled backwards away from the scene. Dom lay on the ground, emotionless even while bleeding. Jackson turned to Sei, his hair sticking to the sweat on his forehead as he strained to keep his hold on Val.

“Get him out of here! Now!”

Sei rushed to the lowlander’s side, looping his arm around her shoulder and hauling him to his feet. Val bellowed behind them.

“Let me GO, you godsforsaken BASTARDS! I’m not done with him!” The small force of soldiers now restraining her were trying to speak to her, trying to appeal to reason or mercy. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. “IF SHE DIES, DOM, I’LL KILL YOU. IF SHE DIES, I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF.”

Sei led him away. She packed enough to travel, so they could leave as soon as night fell. He was of no use here anymore. He would want to stay, of course. But the time had come. They needed to seek out her grandfather.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She sees it over and over again in her head. She closes her eyes and hears the blast, sees the terrible light of it on the back of her eyelids. She fucking dreams about it. Dreams about the blast and the fire and the charred skin. She dreams about the screaming. Kenna’s screaming, as the medics tried to cut the remains of her clothing away from the charred mess of her skin. Val had clenched her fists so hard her nails had pierced the callused flesh of her palm, blood dripping from down her knuckles and into the grass at her feet. She hadn’t felt the tears pouring down her cheeks, leaving clean trails in the battle grime that still covered her face.

After what felt like an entire lifetime, the screams fell silent. The pain had finally taken her, Kenna slipping into unconsciousness. Val’s heart thundered in her ears. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the screams or the silence. At least screaming meant she was alive. Screaming meant she was fighting. She felt bile rise in the back of her throat.

A hand touched her shoulder and she whirled around, snatching the offending wrist out of the air. That rage that had been boiling just beneath her skin burst forth again, her fist clenching hard enough to bruise. And then her eyes fell on Annelyse.

The raven-haired woman’s eyes were wide with shock and pain. Val realized belatedly that the noble woman’s hand had come up to claw against the mercenary’s clenched fist, trying to free her wrist from the crushing force. Val released her as fast as she could, recoiling as if she’d been burned. She turned, rasping out an apology and beginning to walk away. Annelyse’s hand found her shoulder again. Val stopped in her tracks.

“Val?”

Annelyse’s voice was soft. Val could hear the tears in it, as if the queen was just barely holding back her own sobs. Val stiffened, fists clenching at her sides. She made no response.  
“Val, please,” Annelyse’s eyes were flitting back and forth, searching for something in the eyes of the mercenary. “I know you care about her, we all do, but-”

Val turned on her, body twisting to face her and then menacing above her. Her face contorted with a scowl, hissing, “You don’t know anything about what I’m feeling.”

Annelyse’s face fell. Pretty words and soft smiles had gotten her many places in life. They would be of no use to her here. Her eyes met those of her friend’s, this young woman who had seen so much and so little of the world all at once. Val saw the moment it happened, the moment the raven-haired woman found whatever it was that she had been searching for in her eyes. The pity melted away to understanding, clarity. The rage in Val’s stomach tightened into cold fear.

“You love her.”

She wished she could fling Annelyse into any one of the hells at this moment. Wished that fire that had been haunting her every waking moment would come and swallow her up like it had Kenna.

She knew it. She fucking knew it, but hearing it out loud, hearing it from someone else’s mouth made all of the bile come biting back up her throat.

She squeezed her eyes shut, closing herself off to the world and her friend before her, whose clarity was threatening to overwhelm her. She took a deep, shuddering breath. A broken laugh escaped her lungs, and turned to a sob before it died on her lips.

She loved Kenna. Somewhere along the line, somewhere between wanting to hog tie the little noble priss to sell to the highest bidder and risking life and limb to put her on a throne she couldn’t give less of a shit about, Val No-Name Filthy Mercenary had fallen in love with the Queen of fucking Stormhalt. It would be comical if it wasn’t crushing her entire being.

She was in love with Kenna. And Kenna was currently fighting for her life because some dickless moron hadn’t been able to control his own freakish shit. The rage came back a hundred-fold.

“Oh, Val, I’m so sorry.” Annelyse’s gentle voice cut through the howling white noise in her mind. A gentle hand found its way to her shoulder again. “I didn’t know.”

Val threw the hand off her, refusing to meet the smaller woman’s eyes. Annelyse, with all her glamor and gossip and unending fucking kindness, didn’t deserve the hate and rage Val could feel blazing within her again. The mercenary spun on her heel, setting off for the woods.

“You don’t know shit.” She wished her voice wasn’t choked with tears. It would make the menace more convincing. “Find me when she wakes up.”

She didn’t give her time to answer. She couldn’t. Her life had carved her into a weapon, blunt and bloodied and violent beyond anything. She wasn’t prepared for this, could never had prepared herself for this. For Kenna and her soft smile, Kenna and her beautiful brown eyes, Kenna with the sword arm that had knocked grown men- and Val, multiple times- on their asses.

She was glad that Annelyse knew her well enough not to pursue her. She was glad that she had had the presence of mind to stalk off in the direction with the least amount of eyes to follow her. She could feel the tears streaking down her face, hot and growing heavier by the second with the grime and gore she hadn’t had the will to clean off for days.

She was in love with Kenna Rhys.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s days later, and the guilt and not knowing are killing her. She hasn’t eaten, has hardly slept. She hasn’t spoken in days either. She’s starting to feel more like a beast than a woman. Her leg hangs over the branch she’s laying on, bouncing with nervous energy.

Kenna could be dead. She could have gotten an infection and the fever could have burned her mind away to nothing like her body had been.

Or she could be awake. She could have recovered and moved on to her next victory. Moved on and left Val behind.

The angry tears rise unbidden to her eyes like they have so many times in the past few days. The sorrow mingles with the guilt, and rises in her throat with her fear of abandonment to choke her. Both options spell torment for her. She swipes angrily at the tears and curses Annelyse for the hundredth thousandth time since she’d opened her gorgeous painted mouth.

“You love her.”

Her words have played over and over again in Val’s head. It was the ballad of her own anguish: Annelyse’s gut-wrenching truth, the blast of fire, and Kenna’s screams. What little sleep she had was plagued by all three. She could feel the strain of it all in the deep purple bags beneath her eyes.

Val clenched her fists, trying to bring her mind back around to physical pain rather than the emotional torment that she had no idea how to even begin to deal with. She’d punched a couple of trees. Punched a lot of trees, actually. When everything else failed, it never hurt to return to the mercenary brute best practices. She’d punched and punched until the skin had been stripped away and blood caked her knuckles. And then she’d kept punching. Now, as her fist clenched, the scabs began to crack and burn bright again with renewed pain. It helped her focus, helped her remember that something familiar was still here along with all the terrifying new feelings that were swirling like a maelstrom within her.

“Val, are you there? Can you hear me?”

Her heart freezes in her chest.

Kenna.

The very woman at the center of her torment, and she was stomping her way through the underbrush as if there weren’t a world of people out there that would see her gutted and dead. Val’s fists clench even tighter, her nails biting now into the scabs on her palms. Her heart had thawed from its initial shock, and now it was pounding away in her chest like it wanted to escape.

Kenna came into view. Bandaged and limping, but gods, as beautiful as she always was. Val rolled her eyes at herself and her stupid heart. Yeah, escape and fucking throw itself at her like some kind of pansy.

Kenna’s still calling for her, still stomping through the forest like a damn stampede. Val grits her teeth. If she was going to feel stupid and mushy, she was at least going to be pissed off about it.

“I think just about everyone in the Five Kingdoms can hear you.”

It’s more biting than she meant it to be. She’s not angry with Kenna. She doesn’t think she can be anymore, thanks to twice-damned Annelyse. Val swings her leg back over the branch and uses the momentum to bring her body into the air. She can see Kenna look up into the canopy of the woods, beautiful brown eyes scanning for her amongst the foliage.

Fuck, have her eyes always been like that?

She lands in front of her with a thud, then straightens. It makes her feel better, slightly, that she is at least a good head taller than the Queen of Stormhalt. Kenna may be melting her brain without even knowing it, but it was nice to remember that she was still so small. It made her feel more human, and Val needed that reminder to pull her brain and her heart out of whatever stupid damn rabbit hole they were trying to run down.

Kenna’s lips curve into a bright smile. “There you are.”

Pretty girls have smiled at her before. This particular pretty girl has the power to turn her into a bumbling disaster. Val lets the earlier annoyance and anger flow back into her. Better to be on guard. She couldn’t believe how attached she’d become to this little royal who’d come out of nowhere and swept her up in this grand tale of heroics and legend. It put her on edge. Caring wasn’t something she did, and for good reason. It hurt. She could still see Kenna’s limp, lifeless form in her mind. Seeing her here in front of her, smiling and joking like always, was a hard adjustment.

Yeah,” she bites out. “Here I am.”

There’s hurt and confusion playing out on Kenna’s face. Her eyes scan Val, searching for something. Val ignores it.

“Val, I was worried about you.” Her voice is soft. Kenna is always surprisingly gentle. For someone who could make the biggest and meanest fighters wither with a look and a short sword, Kenna was also merciful and kind to a nauseating degree. But this wasn’t just her kindness. This was… something else. Val is stunned.

“You were?”

Kenna steps forward. She’s close enough now that Val can see the red and angry flesh just above the wrappings of bandages, smell the scent of her hair. “Of course. Leon said you disappeared out here after the battle.” Kenna’s lips turn down in a frown. Val’s eyes follow them, linger for just a moment too long. “I was just surprised to hear that you got so upset…You didn’t react this way after Stormhalt.”

She didn’t get it. Of course she didn’t. “That was different.”

Confusion again. Val doesn’t like the way it looks on her. Doesn’t like her lips pulling down into a frown or the warm glow in her eyes fading away to concern. “Different… how?”

The exasperation washes over her. She could feel the anger she’d been working so hard to use as armor melt away. How to explain the feelings she didn’t even fully understand, to the very same frustrating, needy, beautiful woman who was causing them?

“Let me put it this way…” she starts, heart once again pounding against her breastbone. She was too much of a brute for beating around the bush. And she had come too close to losing Kenna once already. It was time to be one part brave and two parts stupid. “When you’re a mercenary, spending time with brutes like Severin, it’s easy not to care about the guys next to you. If they lived, if they died… it was all just another day’s work.”

A rueful smile pulled Kenna’s lips back up. They looked so soft. Val liked it a lot more when she smiled. “All for the coin, right?”

“Right. When you’re in the middle of battle, you can’t be thinking about someone else’s neck. You’ve just got to look out for your own. You can’t get attached. You can’t care.” And that’s where the whole issue was, wasn’t it? Her face twists in that odd combination of pain and sadness that these past few days had placed upon her. “But when I saw you lying there on the castle stones, all burned and lifeless…” Her face twists back to that dark anger. Even if she didn’t understand love, hate was something she could work with. And she hated Dominic. “Well, first, I damn near killed pretty boy for roasting you.”

Val regrets the word choice as soon as it’s escaped her, but Kenna seems to have paid it no mind. Her elegant eyebrows shoot up high on her forehead, her mouth open in a small ‘o’ of shock. “You attacked Dom? Who won?”

Val would laugh at the question if the memory didn’t feel like raking herself belly first over a field of broken glass.

“Leon and Jackson stopped me before I could really do much damage. That’s when I left. And while I’ve been out here, I realized…” Anger again. Her face contorts into a scowl, the angry storm inside of her starting to boil its way out once again. “As much as I tell myself I’m just here for my payout when all this is over…” The anger melts away to sadness just as quickly. Val furrows her brow and frowns. She’s disappointed in herself. She’d let so little affect her for her entire life, and now here she was. About to dump her weird, mushy feelings all over a fucking queen. She pushes forward. “…It’s not true. Not anymore. You’re not just some dumb royal I’m scheming to make coin off of.”

A grin. If Val didn’t love her smile so much, she’d smack it off her face. “Aww, Val.”

Val’s pout turns to a scowl, that familiar anger back again. Kenna was beautiful, powerful, and infuriating. “Shut up. I’m trying to say something.”

She takes a deep breath. The sadness returns to her face.

Now or never, Val. You might not get another chance if you fuck this up.

“I’m starting to, you know, care about all these people,” she forces herself to say. She pauses then, forcing herself to meet Kenna’s gorgeous, warm brown eyes. “… about you most of all.”

The teasing light leaves her brown eyes. Kenna’s brow furrows ever so slightly. Val feels like she’s going to scream or vomit. Maybe even both.

“Val… are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

The scowl returns. “I am. Just don’t make me say it.”

The weight of her words- said and refused-to-be-said- wash over them both. She can feel it in the air between them now. Everything is different. Val opened her damn mouth and now everything was going to change and-

The grin returns to the young queen’s face. “Pretty sure no one can make you say anything.”

Or maybe nothing would change.

All three hells take her. All Kenna had to do was smile and crack some stupid joke and Val knew exactly what she was going to do with her life from this point on. The last few days of emotional torment were finally over. She had a clarity now. A purpose. She allowed a small smile to pull at her lips.

“That’s enough of this feelings stuff."

The certainty pushes her forward. Val quickly pulls out a knife and holds it to her palm. Immediately Kenna’s face shifts to shock and fear.

“Whoa! What are you doing?!”

This woman had cut down legion after legion of men, and now she was standing there with her mouth agape because of a little knife. Val didn’t think she’d ever tire of the weird contradictions that made Kenna into the beautiful disaster she was.

“Queen Kenna… I, Val Greaves, hereby pledge myself to you.”

She’s trying to keep the solemnity in her voice, but Kenna’s face is making it difficult. The shock is now tinged with growing horror. “You’re not going to cut yourself, are you?”

She stares into Kenna’s eyes, exasperated. “It’s a blood oath, Kenna. Blood is required.”

Val goes to make the cut, but Kenna lunges forward. Before Val can react, Kenna’s hands have ripped the knife from her grip.

“Hey!” Val shouts, angry and indignant. She tries to make a grand gesture and Kenna can’t even let her have that. “I need that if I’m gonna do this right!”

Kenna has stepped out of her immediate proximity, holding the knife protectively against her and out of Val’s reach. Her voice is gentle, eyes looking at Val with affection that makes her stomach start to flop around. “I don’t need a blood oath from you,” the cheeky grin is back, and Val finds comfort in it despite herself. “A regular, blood-free oath will do just fine.”

Exasperation and exhaustion win out. Val pouts again. “Ugh. Fine. You’re no fun, you know that?”

Kenna’s grin spreads. Val is reminded of the sun coming through the clouds after a storm. Val is also reminded that poetry and other fluffy shit is best left to poets and pansies and not to her. Kenna’s eyes dance with delight. “Yes, I’ve been told.”

The mercenary huffs, then drops to her knee in front of her. She forces her eyes to meet Kenna’s, swallows to force her heart and stomach to stop their fluttering and nonsense.  
“I am sworn to you now, Kenna.”

Kenna’s face is serious again, the levity of the moments before gone and her brown eyes burning with determination. “You ready to win this war?”

A grin spreads across Val’s face. Fighting and war were things she knew she could handle. “Ready? Kenna, I’d follow you to the three hells and back if I needed to.”

And she knew now that she would. That she would give just about anything to keep Kenna in her life, to keep Kenna safe and happy and smiling. The three hells and every other pain the world could throw at her seemed so small in comparison.

“Good, because the way things are going, that might just be the next stop…”

  



End file.
